by Lauren Suzanne (’21)
TW: Homophobia, Abuse/Violence, and mental unwellness
Father’s Day being in June is homophobic
As soon as I stood up, you were done listening. I fought for miles and miles, over hills and valleys to get here. And what you give me in return is nothing. A check for 600 dollars.
I ripped my vital organs out, sanded them down, made them so smooth you could see your reflection. I stitched them together, scribbled a note between the veins, I am sorry. Could you please at least be here for me. I crafted a box out of birthday cards and pages from textbooks, multi-colored crayon wrappers and comics. Stuffed the red matter inside, folded the edges. I waited for you.
And when I gave you the box, all my insides fixed up and whole, free from sin, free from the bad thoughts, you smiled and said, That’s great, honey. By the way, what are you majoring in again? Then three months with no calls, no thoughts or well wishes. A birthday party uninvited, an engagement party choked with loss.
I stole the box from underneath your front porch. You didn’t want it anyway. You probably hid it in the closet or swept it under the cobwebs with a long enough broom so your worldview wouldn’t be questioned. I drove home with the pulsing, moldy package in my passenger seat. I rolled the window down so we could both get some air, me and my body.
When I got home, I walked up the apartment steps to the apartment door and ended up blank faced on the apartment floor. The cat came over and sniffed the box. I considered my circumstance. The floorboards, the shower drain, the pantry along with the baked beans and tumeric. Where do you go, I asked my bleeding box. The microwave answered with a flattened hum.
Then I saw my life stretched out over the countertops. The first half is decorated with french toast and heartbreak. Do you remember the time me and Jenni were crying, aching while you tried to get us dressed for school. I told you I knew I was sick and you didn’t believe me. You checked our temperature and the number read 105. Next thing, we were dropped off at a friends’ house for the day and Jenni was crying and throwing up in their living room. When can I see mama, she asked the carpet. I couldn’t respond; I could only observe the way things were falling apart like branches and limbs strewn from a storm.
I gathered my breaths like the doctors taught me and I opened the box. Nothing was there to spill out. The blood had dried and the organs were empty, white and malnourished. A skeleton heart. The ventricles were hardened, the tissues decaying, the whole thing smelled like certain death. Outside, I prepared a wake for my kidneys and lungs, my heart already too far gone. Along the meat of my former organs, I see a set of ghostly, curved words.
You know how proud I am of you, but the simple answer, sweetheart, is no.
The drag of a cigarette and the stink of dank earth colored the rest of the afternoon. I buried the box and danced on the grave. The tombstone read, fuck off or maybe, freedom.
‘April is the cruelest month’
Oklahoma City, 1995
five days before I left the womb,
the sky opened up — my mother’s belly
reverberated from the aftershock. Maybe from birth
I was marked with the unique stain of America-
n violence
that ebbs and flows in the molecules of air —
poison, long term and short.
The Trump Administration, 2017
my dad waited until I was 23
to tell me that mom was on prozac when
she was pregnant with me.
the only antidepressant that ever worked
for me, the waste of time and prescriptions
before i got there, might have felt like
my mother’s 12 hour labor,
the doctors willing her vagina to dilate
before cutting her open —
I cried and cried, finally awake at 10:32pm.
and the first thing they do is hand me to a man
who would abandon me and my mom as soon
as he found another woman to own.
Sandy Hook, 2012
twelfth grade second period
government and economics, we watched on TV as the line of
children outside of elementary school huddled for
warmth while twenty children drained of blood.
some guy made fun of obama for crying when all
the salt water in the world wouldn’t be enough
to wash away the american stain
my father told me, eight years after her death,
he hardly thinks about her — my mother.
I grew lightheaded with anger, sitting
in his well manicured Ford crossover,
thinking how men will polish their jewels
before they open up to another woman,
least likely their daughters or wives,
who they train, years and years, to
believe their politics, their bullshit
A southern apocalypse
Tennessee’s poet laureate is Taylor Swift
and her bedazzled guitar, adorned with teardrops.
She serenades the Walmart parking lot at sundown.
More specifically, twelve miles from the Cumberland, sits the
statue of Nathan Bedford Fuckboy, splotched with
Pepto Bismol pink, riding horseback, backwards
through history; yet
motionless, the epitome of frailty.
She sings in undulating tones,
splits the earth between fingernails.
The last hour alive, a judgment day of sorts:
our dusty, home-cooked reckoning will be celebrated with
a country-pop crossover, hotdogs, BBQ sauce,
and a sixteen minute firework show as God, a
woman, breathlessly counts who showed up for Sunday mass,
who gambled their retirement away, who fucked Ted’s sister, smoked
weed in grandma’s Toyota, set fire to the abandoned shell station in Woodbine,
put pills down their throat before choking them up. Please tell
that motherfucker Dante
we all had it coming, anyway.
From birth, we mold our globes with clay, crawdads,
and sawdust, fingers grasping for more light,
or even: a way out
Lauren Suzanne (’21)
Queerness, with its possibilities for new ways of living. These two poems explore the implications of being born in a traditional nuclear family, with its power dynamics and implicit support of the patriarchy. These poems also explore the tendency of fathers to abandon their daughters and wives, and how that alienates queer people, who are already predisposed to displacement because of societal stigma and homophobia.
Additionally, I explore with this work the idea of being American and how it has always been tied to violence. How mass shootings are commonplace, and the people who are targeted are more often than not people of color or the LGBTQIA community. I am interested in how patriarchal violence is the common thread in American history, and how we must dispose of this way of being if this country is ever to heal.